Category Archives: Customer Experience

I made a quick trip into a well-known retailer this week and was appalled at what transpired immediately when I entered.

One manager, walking towards me, looked right at me and kept walking. A second manager, just past this first, looked at me as I made eye contact with him, stared at me for about 2 seconds, then promptly turned and walked away.

No greeting. No “Hello, Welcome to…”. No focus on the customer experience at all.

If one of their competitors, small business or large, decided to up their game and greet their customers at the door and ensure even a small level of engagement throughout the store, they would put this established location out of business.

Customers want to feel acknowledged. It’s the basic tenet in many studies of behavior. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs addresses this in both the Belonging and Esteem levels. Hyrum Smith, of Franklin Planner fame, expresses this in the Needs Wheel of The Reality Model.

And yet many many leaders fail to model this basic behavior.

That’s why even a little focus on the customer experience will enable an organization to crush it and create raving fans.

When the focus is on either the bottom line, getting the job done, or surviving through the day, your customers feel it and are likewise impacted. Even elderly people with dementia or diminished senses in a nursing home sense when they are treated poorly or ignored.

Making your customers and those you cater to feel engaged always makes the difference.

If you want your leadership and your organization to stand out, and to crush it in a day where customer experience is largely lacking, then make them feel special and create even the smallest of differences in their experience.

Because that’s what you want when you are a customer. It’s one of our basic needs.

Companies have a funny way of justifying that they are better than what their customers say they are.

If you think that’s off the mark, check out the online reviews of companies and see their responses back to the customers. Or any public statement when it comes to an incident such as a recall, injury, or other negative issue the company is involved in.

These answers vary but all have the same root political spin to them. At the core of their responses, the infamous line usually appears:

We pride ourselves in delivering the best experience to our customers.

And that is also coupled with another phrase touting the company’s (relative) success up until that point:

We have had thousands of satisfied customers…; We have succeeded in the indsutry by…:

And quite frankly, responses like these are lame, pathetic, and serve no good to that customer or any other customer.

All a customer simply wants is their needs and expectations met or exceeded.

Your success does nothing for the customer with a complaint.

I have seen many companies and individuals offer excuses for delivering on poor service. The following are some actual responses from these organizations and professionals:

Away taking awards trips (and focusing on self rather than making sure customers are tended to)

Busy in meetings all day (customer feels they are not the prioirty)

We’ve made xxx amount of money in the last year (that is not helping the cusotmer today)

We’ve never had a problem before (totally irrelevant to the situation)

If the customer cannot feel connected to you, then you are not a success in their eyes. They are the only ones that truly matter and failure to take action to meet their expectations or to take accountability for dropping the ball will have a negative impact on your business. Sustained excuses and touting your ability to deliver when it’s really not there will have far-reaching damage on your credibility as a leader and an organization.

It’s said in the restaurant industry, “You’re only as good as your last meal served.” A better phrase would be “You’re only as good as the customer you just served”. Nothing you’ve done in the past, even the prior minute, matters.

The only thing that matters to the customer is what you do for them while they’re standing in front of you.

Earlier today I was talking with two very good friends of mine, one a manager in a manufacturing facility and the other a supervisor for a regional utility company. As is usual each week, our discussion turned to work.

They described the challenges their companies had in properly serving the end user – the customer. Some of the things we discovered about their companies centered on the rationales of their organizations to focus on relatively important items, and not the ultimately important item – the customer.

The dysfunction of many companies – even larger, global, and successful ones – invariably finds it root in the vision of the company being taken off of the customers they serve, and onto the by products to delivering great service.

So from their discussion and other observations, here are some red flags that will inform you if your company is not customer focused as they should:

Many, if not all, decisions are based on budget

Many individual leadership decisions are based on their own bonus

Metrics on productivity take on more meaning than the customer experience

Policies and regulations are thrown out in defense of actions (in order to minimize risk) that don’t meet customer needs

If any of these or other actions result in a failure to truly have customers as the core company focus, it’s time to react. Getting all departments, systems, and efforts tuned-in to the customer experience will correct many of these issues, and their results may even be better than the pursuit of those results on their own merits.

Any company can drift over time and end up in the above situations. It’s not a fatal trap, but can lead to fatality if not corrected before the customers figure it out. By having a laser focus on excellent customer service, you’ll create a cultural vortex that will bend all efforts vision towards the customer and lead to even better success.